As new Lightning features keep rolling in, sooner or later, the transition from Salesforce Classic to Lightning is inevitable. What is Salesforce Lightning and how to decide if migration from Classic is right for your business?

What is Salesforce Lightning?

Salesforce Lightning is an upgrade from Salesforce Classic, which can be described as a step change, and not just an incremental one. It upgraded the look of Classic UI and more importantly, it upgraded the productivity for the individual user. When the classic to lightning migration is carried out to leverage the real transformational capability of Salesforce Lightning CRM, it is essentially a re-implementation of Salesforce. You don’t have to import your data, recreate your custom fields, or set up your security model. However, everything else may need to be revisited with a fresh lens, including:

• User Interface: The new Lightning Experience comes packed with up to 25 tabs, 3-column layouts, Components, Paths, etc.

• Business Processes: It’s time to go back to your requirements and experience how Lightning can solve a problem differently.

• 3rd Party AppExchange Apps: Are your existing apps Lightning-Ready? Take the inventory and find out!

• Custom Code: If your custom code doesn’t perform well in Lightning, you may have to address and work on removing technical debt.

• Training: All existing users have to be retrained to ensure productive adoption of new Lightning features.

• Analytics: Improving the functionality, users now have access to more than three-column dashboards as well as a new Lightning report builder.

Is Salesforce Classic Going Away?

With a new chapter in Salesforce’s evolution, does it mean that Salesforce Classic will be going away?

Not anytime soon, no. Users have the choice of moving on to the new Lightning Experience whenever they wish, as well as choosing the users they wish to migrate to the new platform.

It would be wise to start planning your move to the new Lightning UI as soon as possible. Users choosing to remain with the Classic edition will be paying for the fresh Salesforce services and updates that roll out three times a year in the form of recurring license costs, without actually receiving any of its benefits.

You may be interested in: Salesforce Lightning vs Classic: A comprehensive comparison

Upgrading to Salesforce Lightning And Is it Right For Your Company

Salesforce has provided a Lightning Migration Assistant to enable the Lightning Experience from Classic. If you’re wondering what you need to successfully migrate to Lightning, you can access the evaluate section and run a Readiness Report to estimate the following:

• Lightning Experience’s impact on your users’ productivity
• The effort required to roll out the Lightning experience efficiently

But before you flip the switch to run the Readiness Check report, we would like to share a slice of our experience with you.

At Dreamforce 2017, Salesforce Consultants from Cymetrix had a small Lightning round-table discussion with other participants who were senior consultants. The idea was to discuss how to migrate from the classic edition to Lightning smoothly. During the round-table session, the Lightning Readiness Assessment Report came up.

• Our key takeaway from this discussion was that the Readiness Assessment Report is a good way to start planning classic to Lightning migration. But we need to go beyond this report and do a detailed analysis of all important features that might be affected during migration.
• Other than compatibility analysis, we also need to assess the efforts needed to perform the migration. Differences have been observed in effort calculations in the Assessment Report compared to the detailed assessment performed by the Salesforce consultants.
• The group agreed that in such scenarios, the clients require a clear sense of direction with an explanation as to why they are seeing this difference.

Do you want to take advantage of the Salesforce Lightning Experience and want to evaluate whether your organization is ready? Certified Salesforce Consultants from Cymetrix Software can work with you to build a plan outlining the next steps you need to start using the Salesforce Lightning Experience.